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Strategic planning relies on strategic thinking. To think strategically we need to explore beyond our common environment, the usual places we look and the usual way in which we look at. The “Did You Know” series of videos is an excellent tool to use at the beginning of any strategic or planning discussion. And it’s been updated! Have a look – and start your next staff discussion with it:

I love Angry Birds. It’s addictive. Ask the bleary-eyed friend who’d stayed up way too late determined to get to the next level — and got me hooked on it. So, of course I laughed when I saw www.cio.com’s article, “10 Lessons from Angry Birds That Can Make you a Better CIO”:

you have to play to know the rules people succeed best when their unique talents are recognized; I’d add her “and utilized” cuz too often, they aren’t you can’t recover from a really bad start so cut your losses, restart & try again different problems require different specialists; seems obvious, but it’s not often the case blowing something up isn’t necessarily felt everywhere; “You can’t just fiddle with a solution in the corner and hope that it will disburse throughout the organization. It takes a clear understanding of organizational physics to make change stick.” most improvements are incremental; isn’t that the truth? “If you want a high score you have to be patient and accept incremental improvement by applying lessons learned from past attempts. Every once in a while, you change a strategy or accidentally discover a new tactic that results in an exponential improvement in the score, but that is very rare.” just because you’ve mastered one task doesn’t make you master of all……sigh……true, true…. you can never do the same thing exactly the same way some goals require more birds there’s more than one way to win.

University of Florida has followed University of California at Berkeley in offering a course using a web game to teach problem-solving and strategizing. But whereas Berkeley’s course was a pass/fail-not-part-of-student-grades course, this course is a 2-credit honors course. YES!

“21st Century Skills in Starcraft” is an eight-week class that “does not teach about Starcraft,” but combines weekly gameplay, analysis of recorded matches and “synthesis of real/game-world concepts,” to develop workplace skills.Part of the course description for the interdisciplinary honors course reads:

“With society becoming increasingly technology-based and fast-paced, it is important for professionals to be highly proficient in skills such as critical thinking, problem solving, resource management, and adaptive decision making. These skills are fundamental in Starcraft and therefore make the game a highly effective environment for students to analyze and take action in complex situations.”The course is open to twenty students that have access to a Mac or PC, Internet access outside the school labs and experience playing the popular game.”

Public libraries — the next the Board expresses their discomfort with “games” in the library, that highlighted phrase is worth citing.